For my first prototype, I made a very basic and short demo of the game opened up on Unity for people to try out and see. There was one scene and two character sprites (1 NPC and 1 player). As for mechanics, the only thing players were able to do was walk from one end of the area to the other (arrow keys to move left and right) and interact with the one npc provided (spacebar to interact). Interacting with the npc will bring up one dialogue box with only one line of dialogue. And then clicking after the dialogue’s finished would just let players exit the dialogue/close the dialogue box. All of these actions are repeatable. One thing I didn’t predict was me breaking this demo somewhat before showing it so the popping up and closing of the dialogue had to be done manually.

What I had hoped to learn from this prototype was basically how people felt about it overall in terms of aesthetics (if it looked nice, if everything fit together) and if anything should be changed art-wise or UI wise. To get the answers, I had people go through the demo first and then asked them questions directly.

I learned that people found the overall style of the game’s art nice. As for the UI, suggestions were made on how I could change the dialogue box’s art and color. For example, one suggestion was to test out how the dialogue box looked against the other scenes/backgrounds I’ve made and see if the color of it matched as well as it did with the orange background (bg). The reason for this was because I had made it a shade of brown which worked well with the mainly orange bg presented, but as all bgs are very simplistic and monochromatic (ex: only orange and white or only blue and black), the brown color may not look as nice when matched with a bg of, say, a red color. Other things I learned were that a rollout type of animation for the text would be nice and that a fast speed for it would be ideal, and that the implementation of a back button for text might be nice.